Feminist Philosophy of Biology

First published Wed Jun 22, 2011

Practitioners of feminist philosophy of biology use gender as an
analytic category to conduct philosophical investigations of the
biological sciences. Feminist philosophy of biology deploys feminist
philosophical methods to examine the categories of sex and gender (sex
and gender will be explained below) and its focus can range from
considerations of particular biological knowledge claims to
considerations of foundational concepts and methodologies in biology,
the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of science. In
doing so, feminist philosophers of biology often show that the
philosophical investigations of a particular science are intertwined
with both ethics and politics.

This entry is divided into five sections. The introductory
section discusses some of the challenges of defining feminist
philosophy of biology and highlights areas of commonality with
non-feminist philosophy of biology. The second section explores the
variety of motivations and epistemic perspectives found within feminist
philosophy of biology. The third section considers, in some
depth, two central examples of feminist analysis of biological
research: a) sexual selection and b) sociobiology and evolutionary
psychology of sex and gender. In section four I discuss feminist
analyses of some foundational concepts within philosophy of biology and
philosophy of science more generally, such as biological determinism
and reductionism. Many of these foundational concepts are
considered by both feminist and non-feminist philosophers of
biology. The entry concludes with a discussion of opportunities
for further research in feminist philosophy of biology.

Feminist philosophy of biology bears much in common with
non-feminist philosophy of biology. Non-feminist philosophy of
biology is highly interdisciplinary and has unclear disciplinary
boundaries. Major contributors include scientists as well as
philosophers. There are two general and often closely related
approaches to the practice of philosophy of biology. First, philosophy
of biology uses philosophical methods to address topics of central
importance in the biological sciences, such as natural selection,
fitness, adaptation, and the nature of genes. Second, philosophy
of biology addresses central topics in the philosophy of science, such
as reductionism, laws of nature, and theory change, from the
perspective of the biological sciences instead of physics as is more
traditional in philosophy of science. Philosophy of biology is
often informed by a naturalistic approach, meaning that the work is
closely tied to the actual history and practice of the science in
question. It is not uncommon for philosophers of biology, at
least at some point during their careers, to become significantly
involved with the science itself, either in terms of conducting
biological research or collaborating with biologists on research or
pedagogical projects.

The boundaries of feminist philosophy of biology are similarly
unclear. It is not clear whether the authors cited in this entry would
primarily label themselves as philosophers of biology or science
studies scholars or scientists. Not surprisingly, the two general
approaches to philosophy of biology are also advanced in feminist
philosophy of biology. First, many feminist philosophers of
biology are concerned with biological concepts and knowledge claims
regarding sex and gender
(see the entry on feminist perspectives on sex and gender),
as well as the influence of gender values on
biological research. Sex refers to biological differences between males
and females. Gender refers to the meanings that humans make of these
biological differences, and the individual and social aspects of
masculinity and femininity. Since it is with our bodies that we
act, and since psychological and social causes can affect our bodies,
there is much debate about the relationships between sex and gender. By
‘male’ and ‘female’ I am referring to the sex
of human and non-human organisms and by ‘men’ and
‘women’ I am referring to the gender of humans. Feminist
analysis is often performed as a control (in a sense to be explained
below) to test for the unrecognized influence of gender values on the
production of knowledge, in existing knowledge claims, and in the
choices of research projects. These gender values can include
sexism (devaluation, in practice primarily of women, based on
traditional stereotypes of gender roles) and androcentrism (a focus on
men or males and the neglect or exclusion of women or females).
As I will explain in more detail below, feminist investigations
of the relationships between gender values, and the practices and
products of the biological sciences, can take place in a range of
epistemological projects. Some projects focus on removing gender
bias, and others focus on developing an understanding of the role of
social values, including gender values, in biological research.

Second, feminist philosophy of biology considers the gendered nature
of foundational concepts in biology, philosophy of biology and
philosophy of science, such as reductionism (see section 4.2),
determinism (see section 4.1) and the nature of objectivity (see the
entry on feminist epistemology and philosophy of science).
As I will discuss below, some feminist philosophers of biology contend
that gendered social values are not only intertwined with particular
theories or knowledge claims, but can also support and be supported by
these foundational concepts (Fehr 2004, Longino 1990). Since
these concepts are of central concern in non-feminist philosophy of
biology and philosophy of science more generally, there is ample
opportunity for feminist and non-feminist philosophy of biology to
become more closely related. There is also significant
feminist work regarding scientific objectivity that is at least
partially motivated by the presence and power of unacknowledged
gendered assumptions, including androcentrism and sexism, in biological
sciences ranging from genetics and cell biology, to sociobiology (for
example Keller 1985, Longino 1990, 2002, Haraway 1989, Harding
1986).

Work in feminist philosophy of biology can be motivated by a number
of, often interrelated, goals including countering biological arguments
supporting women's oppression, revealing and analyzing the role
of gender values in the production of biological knowledge, and
facilitating the production of maximally accurate accounts of female
biology and gendered topics of study in the biological
sciences.

The science of biology is of importance to many feminists because
women's biology has been used to rationalize women's oppression. There
is a wide range of biological arguments supporting the oppression of
women. Take for example Edward H. Clarke's nineteenth century
argument that intensive study would physically harm women by diverting
energy from their uterus to their brain. He claimed that higher
education would result in women with “monstrous brains and puny
bodies … [and] abnormally weak digestion” (Clarke 1874,
41). This argument regarding women's inferiority has been a focus of
feminist philosophy of biology (see for example Hubbard
1990). Similarly, evolutionary arguments that can provide foundational
support for sexist or oppressive practices, for example, arguments for
the adaptive nature of violence against women (see Palmer and
Thornhill (2000) for a readable account of this research program),
have drawn intensive feminist scrutiny (for example see papers in
Travis 2003a). Harvard past-president Lawrence Summers was not the
first or only person to use biological arguments about the different
distributions of intelligence among men and women to justify the
absence of women from positions of social power and from higher
powered careers (Wilson 1978, Summers 2005—see the Other
Internet Resources). Here also, there is a significant feminist
response (Bleier 1984, Fausto-Sterling 1992, Fehr 2008).

Feminists have pointed out that much of the political power of these
sorts of biological arguments arises from problematic assumptions of
determinism (see section 4.1), or in other words, assumptions of a
close connection between women's biology, in terms of genes,
hormones, and physiology, and women's psychological attributes
and social positions. The general notion is that
biology, as opposed to culture, is static and fixed. As a result
some contend that any political activity designed to change or improve
women's condition is trying to create an ‘unnatural’
system that is doomed to fail. This position, while common
in nineteenth and early twentieth century biology, can still be found
in the work of some contemporary biologists, including some early and
influential work in sociobiology (Wilson 1978). As a result
feminists have been strongly motivated to analyze particular claims
about female biology, to interrogate the assumption that genetic or
biological nature implies fixity, and to reveal the wide range of
interacting biological and social causes of women's phenotypes,
including their psychological attributes and social positions. In
section four I will discuss biological determinism in more detail.

Feminist philosophy of biology is also driven by epistemic
motivations. For example, feminists such as Ruth Bleier (1984)
and Anne Fausto-Sterling (1985/1992) reveal that sexist and
androcentric biases can be found in the biological knowledge produced
according to biological science's contemporary best practices or
accepted epistemic standards. This can drive more general
questions about the role that values in general, and gender values in
particular, play in the production of scientific or biological
knowledge (Longino 1990, 2002; Richardson 2008).

Finally, much feminist philosophy of biology is also very concerned
with getting the biology right. Many feminist philosophers of
biology were initially trained as scientists and are interested not
just in critiquing, but also in improving the practice of science as it
relates to sex and gender. Along similar lines, feminist
philosophers have also documented the impact of feminism on improving
the practices of the biological sciences themselves. For example,
Donna Haraway's book Primate Visions (1989) documents
the influence that the incorporation of feminist women in primatology
had on the study of primate behavior and animal behavior more
generally. Haraway shows that feminist primatologist Jeanne
Altmann, instigated a quiet but powerful methodological revolution. In
one of the most cited papers in the study of animal behavior,
“Observational study of behavior: Sampling methods” (1974),
Altmann evaluated a range of sampling methods and in doing so developed
a method, focal-animal sampling, that undermined previous research
generating sexist accounts of leadership and control, and enabled
research on female primates and on novel topics such as mothering.
Altmann, troubled by the androcentric focus in primatology and
less than rigorous methodologies, brought her perspectives as a woman,
a feminist, a mother, and a mathematically trained scientist to bear on
improving research methods. Focal animal sampling provides an
effective method for studying the social behavior of female primates
and has become an important approach in animal behavior research in
general. Haraway's description of Altmann's
contributions to primatology and animal behavior provides an example of
the positive impact of feminism and feminist scientists on the
practices and products of scientific research.

Motivations to conduct research in feminist philosophy of biology
include the drive to challenge biological justifications for
women's oppression, interrogate the epistemic function of gender
values in scientific practice, and improve the practices and products
of biological research on sex and gender.

Getting the biology ‘right’ can mean different things
and there is a range of epistemological positions or objectives held by
feminist philosophers of biology. These objectives include (1)
revealing gender bias in biological accounts of sex and gender, (2)
analyzing science as a social, value-laden practice and (3) exploring
how the social and material situation of biologists affects knowledge
production.

Bias. The largest body of work in feminist philosophy of
biology concerns revealing and eliminating sexist and androcentric
bias. Central and early work in the field documented the presence of
assumptions of female passivity and male activity in a wide range of
biological accounts of sex and gender. Examples include critique of
research on sex determination (Birke 1986, Bleier 1984), fertilization
(Martin 1991), human evolution (Bleier 1984, Fausto-Sterling
1985/1992, Hubbard 1990) and the discipline of primatology (Hrdy 1986,
1997, and Haraway 1989). More recently, Elisabeth Lloyd (1993, 2005)
has studied biological explanations of women's orgasm. She
demonstrates that these accounts often rely on two false assumptions,
assumptions that involve (1) presupposing that these explanations need to
be based on natural selection and (2) presupposing a tight link
between women's sexuality and reproduction. Feminist research on
sexist bias in biology focuses on eliminating myths of female biology
that are colored by contemporary social values and facilitating the
production of biological research that more accurately reveals the
facts about sex and gender. In this sense a feminist perspective is
seen as a sort of control, with the goal of removing gender bias,
i.e., sexist and androcentric social values, from scientific
research. For example, The Biology and Gender Study Group (1988,
61–62) write that,

We have come to look at feminist critique as we would any other
experimental control. Whenever one performs an experiment, one
sets up all the controls one can think of in order to make as certain
as possible that the result obtained does not come from any other
source. One asks oneself what assumptions one is making. Have I
assumed the temperature to be constant? Have I assumed that the pH
doesn't change over the time of the reaction? Feminist critique
asks if there may be some assumptions that we haven't checked
concerning gender bias. In this way feminist critique should be
part of normative science. Like any control, it seeks to provide
critical rigor, and to ignore this critique is to ignore a possible
source of error.

The Biology and Gender Study Group (BGSG) point out that old models
of sex determination simply assumed that female developmental patterns
were neutral and passive, while male developmental patterns required
some sort of active switch to initiate their development (1988).
The BGSG refer with approval to the 1980's work of Eva Eicher and
Linda Washburn, who created a developmental model that did not make the
sexist assumption of female passivity and was based on genetic
evidence. In this model both male and female development had
passive and active components. Further, Eicher and Washburn demonstrate
that although there had been significant research on testes
determination, there had been practically no work on ovary
determination. As a result of this androcentrism, claims about
the passivity of female sexual development were made in the absence of
evidence. The BGSG sees Eicher and Washburn as an example of a
feminist-influenced critique of cell and molecular biology because they
controlled for gender bias. This allowed them to be “open to
different interpretations of one's data” and gave them
“the ability to ask questions that would not have occurred within
the traditional context” (68).

A focus on bias is only one of several epistemic approaches within
feminist philosophy of biology. Sarah Richardson (2010), while
pointing out the value of case studies of gender bias, is critical of
tendencies to focus solely on revealing and removing bias. She
points out that there is institutional pressure to work on bias:
“within philosophy of science as a whole, the most central and
widely-accepted philosophical question related to gender in science is
the issue of gender bias in science.” Richardson argues that
because it is customary in the philosophy of science to see good
science as value neutral, analyses of bias fall clearly within a
traditional philosophical approach. However, even in the face of
these professional incentives, she argues that a primary or sole focus
on bias is a limiting epistemic position. It is limited because
it fails to take into account feminist work, in epistemology and
philosophy of science, that considers how values, including
gender values, not only limit but also facilitate knowledge
production. Such an account complicates the traditional view that
values should be identified solely in order to guard against their
impact and leads to a second epistemic perspective, analyses of science
as a social value-laden practice.

Science as a social value-laden practice. Helen
Longino has developed an influential social account of scientific
knowledge production, critical contextual empiricism (1990,
2002). Her development of this view is informed by her early work
with Ruth Doell (1983) on a case study of biological models of the role
of hormones in the development of sexual behavior. Longino points out
that there is an inferential gap between a theory and the evidence
researchers use to assess that theory. Longino argues that researchers
close the gap between evidence and theories with background assumptions
of which they may not be aware. Background assumptions include
both epistemic and contextual values, and contextual values can include
gendered social values. She argues that scientific communities maximize
objectivity and justification when they (1) include members who differ
from one another in terms of the background assumptions they hold and
(2) take dissenting views seriously. Critical discourse among
those who hold assumptions that differ from one another improves
justification or objectivity because it can facilitate researchers
becoming aware of and critically evaluating the background assumptions
(including those that are sexist and androcentric) that inform their
research practices. Communities can then decide whether or not
those assumptions are acceptable given their research goals. Using
examples including sex differences in human evolution, behavioral
endocrinology and neurobiology, Longino demonstrates that gendered
assumptions structure a range of research programs in biology.
She writes “The long standing devaluation of women's voices
and those of members of racial minorities means that such [racist and
sexist] assumptions have been protected from critical scrutiny”
(1990, 78–79). The implication is that these racist and sexist
assumptions, had they received critical scrutiny, would have been
deemed unacceptable.

Situated knowledge. Donna Haraway coined the term
‘situated knowledge’, this view has become very influential
in academic feminism, including feminist epistemology. In her
book Primate Visions (1989) she explores the ways that
primatology constructs political narratives about the categories of
nature, gender, and race, and the ways that those categories are
integrated with particular perspectives situated in social and material
locations. She also reveals the ways that feminist primatologists
have turned primatology into what some call a feminist science.

In Haraway's account of situated knowledge, the knowing
subject, including the biologist, is embodied, meaning that one has a
particular material and social location (for example one's
location can include being a woman, feminist, scientist, Anglo
American, heterosexual,…). As a result Haraway argues that
it is illusory to think that there is an impartial view from
nowhere. Because of particularities of material and social
location, the perspective(s) from which we know and the knowledge we
produce are partial. According to Haraway, objectivity involves
not only describing the world as faithfully as one can, but also
acknowledging the particularities of one's perspective and being
responsible for the partial perspective (chosen from the multitude of
features of our location) that we employ. Haraway argues
that there is a multitude of ways for dividing the world into objects
and categories. One's perspective does not just influence
one's interests, the questions one asks and the methods, theories
and strategies that one uses to answer those questions; it also
influences one's ontology, in terms of the objects and kinds of
things that one investigates. The job of achieving objectivity then
becomes one of negotiating or translating what we know across different
subject locations, which can include different political, epistemic and
ontological commitments.

Haraway's account of feminist primatologists shows not only
that a partial (as opposed to impartial) feminist perspective was
productive in terms of asking new questions, of illuminating new
objects and categories of objects, and developing new theories.
It also shows that what, at the time, were more mainstream perspectives
were, as all viewpoints, also partial. If those more mainstream
views seemed impartial, it was because those who held them had long
possessed institutional and social power such that they did not need to
consider the alternatives and because the discipline had previously
excluded many who held different partial perspectives.

We can see situated knowledge in Jeanne Altmann's working from
the perspective of a woman, a mother, and a feminist to develop
methodologies that allowed for the systematic study of the often
low-drama interactions among female primates and between mothers and
their offspring, which were previously not salient to
researchers. Another example from Primate Visions (1989)
is Adrienne Zihlman's critique of associations of sexual
dimorphism with, usually male, dominance. Zihlman, who is best known
for her development, with Nancy Tanner, of Woman the Gatherer theory of
early human evolution, consciously developed a feminist stance toward
gender and science. Zihlman argued that sexual dimorphism was not
a unitary phenomenon. Different species can be sexually dimorphic
not only to different degrees, but in different ways, including bone
length and structure, tendencies to build muscle or fat tissue, and/or
canine size. These different kinds of sexual dimorphism can be
related to differences in aggressive capacities and differences in
foraging strategies, both of which had been associated with
evolutionary accounts of gender differences. Zihlman's
stance as a feminist scientist allowed her to focus on heterogeneity
and complexity, which made generalizations about sexual dimorphism
highly problematic and undermined associations of general sexual
dimorphism with male dominance.

As discussed in this section, epistemic perspectives in feminist
philosophy of biology range across work on gender bias, considerations
of biology a social and value-laden practice, and Haraway's
development and use of the idea of situated knowledge.

Feminist interventions regarding evolutionary models of sexual
selection are important for at least two reasons. First, the role
of female organisms in evolution was generally neglected or
misrepresented by biologists until the later part of the
20th century. Second, these models provide theoretical
foundations for many biological accounts of human nature that support
sexist and androcentric stereotypes, in particular accounts that
portray women as passive and coy, and men as active and
promiscuous.

3.1.1 What is sexual selection?

Evolution by natural selection happens when there are heritable
differences among types of organisms in a population and, as a result
of these differences, some types leave more offspring than
others. This leads to changes in the frequencies of those
different types of organisms in a population. Darwin described
sexual selection in terms of “the advantage which certain
individuals have over other individuals of the same sex and species, in
exclusive relation to reproduction (1871, vol. 1 256). In other
words, this advantage need not be one of physiological or mechanical
efficiency or longevity, but rather concerns increasing reproductive
potential. Darwin notes two kinds of sexual selection: male-male
competition and female choice. This twofold characterization of
sexual selection remains standard in current biological literature
ranging from academic publications to textbooks to the popular
press. Darwin writes that “the male is generally eager to
pair with any female” whereas females tend to choose the most
attractive partner (1859, 70; 1871, 582). Darwin considered the
competition among males “for the possession of the other
sex” to result in the improvement of sensory and locomotory
features and the development of strong passions.

This theme is carried through in his discussion in Sexual
Selection in Relation to Man, in which hunting, defense of self
and community, and competition for mates result in the development of
men's “observation, reason, invention and
imagination.” Women obtain these traits because they inherit them
from their fathers. Darwin writes that “It is, indeed, fortunate
that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes
prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have
become as superior in mental endowment to women, as the peacock is in
ornamental plumage to the peahen” (Darwin, 1871, 565). Whereas
Darwin believed that male-male competition was generally thought to
improve the species, female choice resulted in the development of
beauty without utility: “a great number of male animals…
have been rendered beautiful for beauty's sake” (Darwin
1859, 371); “the most refined beauty may serve as a charm for the
female, and for no other purpose” (1871, vol. 2 92). In this
view, the expensive and dangerous displays of the peacock are the
result of the preference of females for males with the most beautiful
display. It is worth noting that Darwin developed his notions of
female choice to account for traits that seemed to be maladaptive from
the perspective of natural selection alone.

Several feminist scholars, most especially Ruth Hubbard (1990), have
clearly pointed out the close parallels of Darwin's account of
eager males competing with one another for access to reticent and
choosy females with Victorian gender values (see also, Fausto-Sterling
1985/1992). It is also noted that the activity of choice Darwin
ascribed to females is caused by a female preoccupation with beauty and
as such often has negative consequences for both male survival and the
species itself. Nonetheless, feminists have revealed that Darwin
was exceptional for theorizing that female choice had any evolutionary
consequences at all. For example, as Helena Cronin (1991) points
out, Darwin's contemporaries, especially Alfred Russell Wallace,
(1) were skeptical that females had an aesthetic sense, (2) believed
that if they did have one, it was unlikely to be stable enough to
result in evolutionary change, (3) believed that female choice, if it
did exist, would be swamped out by natural selection, and finally (4)
believed that the excessive male displays were likely the result of the
excess vigor possessed by male animals and not female choice.
Darwin's theories of sexual selection and especially of female
choice languished for nearly a century.

Contemporary thought regarding sexual selection is heavily
influenced by the work of biologists Angus Bateman and Robert
Trivers. Bateman (1948) hypothesized that variance in
reproductive success would be greater among males than among females.
Female reproduction is limited by the number of eggs a female produces
and during a single reproductive cycle a female uses the sperm from one
or a small number of copulations. According to Bateman's view,
once the female has garnered the sperm needed to fertilize her eggs,
she does not benefit from further mating. As a result a female ought to
be picky about who she mates with and since, according to the theory,
sperm is never in short supply, all females are assumed to produce
about the same number of offspring. Male reproduction, on the other
hand, is limited by the number of females that a male can
inseminate. A male gains benefits from inseminating as many
females as possible. This results in competition among males for access
to females, with some males mating with many females and some males
mating with few or no females. Bateman conducted an experiment
with fruit flies in which he found higher variance in male reproductive
success than female reproductive success.

Trivers (1972) added considerations of parental care to
Bateman's argument. Trivers argues that females generally
invest more than males in reproduction, not only in terms of creating
large eggs, but also in the development and care of offspring. As
a result, females ought to be even choosier regarding mates and become
an even more limited resource for males. Again, it follows that males
are motivated to mate with as many females as possible and females are
motivated to resist male advances in the hope of choosing the best mate
possible. This is correlated with and reinforces stereotypes of
males as active, promiscuous, and competitive, and females as passive,
coy, and nurturing. The rhetoric of the coy female and the promiscuous
male is decreasing but is still common among many accounts of sexual
selection.

Feminist philosophers of biology are deeply concerned about the
wholesale application of this model of sexual selection without
empirically testing its underlying assumptions and investigating the
relationship between the underlying foundations of the model and
cultural assumptions regarding gender. Whether or not it is
intended to do so by researchers in the field, this model can offer
support to current gender inequities. As Hubbard (1990, 110) points
out, “from the seemingly innocent asymmetries between eggs and
sperm flow such major social consequences as female fidelity, male
promiscuity, women's disproportional contribution to the care of
children, and the unequal distribution of labour by sex.” This
model also provides a basis for arguments that rape is an evolved
reproductive strategy among human males (Thornhill and Palmer
2000). And E. O. Wilson (1978, 103) proposes that because of
arguments based on this model “even with identical education for
men and women and equal access to all professions, men are likely to
maintain disproportionate representation in political life, business,
and science.”

3.1.2 Feminist interventions

The traditional theoretical perspective on sexual selection
described above is an elegant model. However, it relies on several
assumptions in order to be applicable to actual cases. Hrdy
(1986) has described three broad categories of assumptions needed to
successfully apply this model to real situations. The first
assumption is that male investment in the production of offspring
is small relative to female investment. Ruth Hubbard
(1990) points out that the challenge here is determining the
appropriate way to characterize and measure investment. Eggs are
larger than sperm. So, if one simply considers gamete size, male
investment is smaller. However, males do not use a microscopic
eyedropper to dispense one sperm at a time. Hubbard questions
whether investment ought to be measured at the level of the individual
gamete. When one includes the total amount of energy and resources that
are need to produce sperm and semen, the energy required to develop and
maintain secondary sexual characteristics (differences between the
sexes that are not directly linked to the reproductive system), the
costs of male-male competition, the costs that males of many species
invest in defending a territory, and the effort that the males of some
species put into parental care, male costs may turn out to be higher
than researchers have historically expected. These male costs may
be further increased if one measures them over an individual's
lifetime as opposed to a single reproductive event. It is
important for researchers to justify their characterization of what
counts as investment.

The second assumption is that there is greater variance in male
than female reproductive success. While this is the case for
many species, (for example, Bateman's fruit flies), it is an
empirical matter whether or not this applies to other species. In
some species, variance in female reproductive success is higher than
has been assumed and in some species, variance in male reproductive
success is lower than is often assumed. Hrdy (1981/1999, 1986)
points out that there has been a lack of attention to ways that a
female can end investment in a particular reproductive attempt, for
example, female birds abandoning nests or spontaneous abortion among
some species of mammals. Attention also needs to be paid to the
effects of a female's physiological condition and social status
on her reproductive output. Hrdy demonstrates that female
primates have an impressive array of active strategies that they employ
to control their own reproduction. For example, competition and
systems of social alliances among female primates can lead to
unexpected variance in female reproductive success. Hubbard
(1990) allows that theoretically there could be greater variance in
reproductive success among men than among women, but claims that
generally most societies have the same number of men and women
producing children and do not operate using a few
“super-studs.” Hubbard points out that it remains to
be demonstrated that weaker men, however one would measure this
characteristic, have fewer children than powerful men and that women
tend to have similar numbers of children.

The final assumption is that the only evolutionary benefit of
sex for females is fertilization. As Sterelny and Griffiths
(1999) report, the power of the model decreases as the gap between sex
and reproduction increases. Hrdy (1986), focusing on primatology,
points out that once the notion of female promiscuity and the idea that
there can be more reasons for mating than simply gathering sperm from
one high quality male, were considered, several new hypotheses
regarding the benefits of female promiscuity emerged. Some of
these hypotheses are still linked to reproduction, although the picture
is more complicated than issues of female choice and male
competition. For example, the diverse paternity hypothesis
predicts that in unpredictable and changing environments a
female's lifetime reproductive success can be improved by
producing offspring with different fathers. Other hypotheses are
not directly related to reproduction. Examples include the
hypothesis that multiple matings and orgasms are physiologically
beneficial to females and the hypothesis that females have sex with
subordinate males to stop these males from leaving the social
group. Hrdy writes that “all but one of these
hypotheses…were arrived at by considering the world from a
female's point of view” (127). She points
out that when this change in perspective was happening, primarily in
the 1970's, there was an increase in the proportion of women
primatologists and that these women were paying attention to female
primates. She doubts that it is just chance that led women
scientists to look at female behaviors, writing in 1986 that “it
is disconcerting to note that primatologists are beginning to find
politically motivated females and nurturing males at roughly the same
time that a woman runs for vice president of the United States and Garry
Trudeau starts to poke fun at ‘caring males’ in his
cartoons (137).”

More recent research on sexual selection has embraced a wider range
of perspectives. In particular there is a growing body of
feminist research on topics such as male mate choice, female-female
competition, and the active female role in evolutionary reproductive
conflicts between the sexes (see Hrdy 1999 and Gowaty 1992, 1997,
2004). Joan Roughgarden offers an alternative to sexual
selection, social selection theory, that focuses on the direct
ecological benefits of social behavior, including animal mating
behavior (2004, 2009). These ecological benefits refer to the
ways that social interactions can improve the number of offspring that
an individual can raise. This theory can account for the
empirical evidence that has been used to support sexual
selection. It does not treat same sex sexuality as anomalous
because these social interactions can provide ecological benefits that
support reproductive success. This theory is the subject of
lively debate. Sexual selection theory is an active field of research,
in which there is lots of opportunity for further feminist
analyses.

Broadly speaking, sociobiology, which arises out of work in
population genetics, population ecology and ethology, is the
evolutionary study of human and non-human social behavior.
Sociobiologists postulate that some behaviors are traits, just like
height or hair color, that are subject to evolution by natural
selection. Ideally, to show that a behavior is an evolutionary
adaptation, researchers must demonstrate that (1) the behavior is
heritable, (2) there is or was behavioral variability among individuals
in a population, and (3) that differential reproduction, caused by the
presence of the behavior in question, led to an increase in the
frequency of individuals tending to exhibit that behavior in a
population. Since researchers cannot go back in time to directly
observe the evolution of current behaviors, they most often rely on
indirect evidence. Sociobiology is most often associated with E.O.
Wilson, either his more general work exemplified in his book
Sociobiology a New Synthesis (1975) or On Human
Nature (1978), which focuses on human sociobiology. There is
feminist work in sociobiology such as Sarah Hrdy's work on
mother-infant relations (1981/1999, 1986).

Evolutionary psychology is sometimes described as
psychology that is informed by evolutionary theory and sometimes
described as the latest version of sociobiology. Evolutionary
psychology differs from sociobiology in several respects. Instead
of looking for adaptive explanations for particular behaviors,
evolutionary psychologists develop adaptive hypotheses for
psychological mechanisms that generate behaviors and tend to assume a
modular theory of mind. Whereas there is incredible diversity of
human behavior, many evolutionary psychologists postulate a smaller
number of mechanisms or modules that are responsible for a range of
behaviors. Much work in evolutionary psychology relies on
evolutionary theoretical foundations and psychological empirical
methods. Major themes in evolutionary psychological research
include studies of social exchange (Cosmides 1989, Cosmides and Tooby
1992, Tooby and Cosmides (1992), family dynamics and conflict
(including violence against stepchildren (Daly and Wilson 2005) and
wives (Wilson and Daly 1998)), and human mate choice and sexual
jealousy (Buss 2003, 2005).

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are prominent in popular
books (ex. Wilson 1978, Buss 1994/2003, 2005) and can be found in
popular media ranging from Business Week (Dotinga 2010) to
WebMD (Denoon—see the Other Internet Resources). There are two
major feminist concerns with much sociobiological and evolutionary
psychological research on sex and gender. First the research presents
a picture of human nature that exhibits androcentric, sexist, and
capitalist social values. Feminist philosophers of biology have been
motivated to carefully analyze this research and have found
significant methodological problems. They have found several areas in
which implicit and unacknowledged social values have influenced this
research and have confounded our understanding of gender and
behavior. For example, Thornhill and Palmer in their book, A
Natural History of Rape (2000), argue that rape is either a
by-product of male adaptations to desire multiple sexual partners, or
an evolutionary adaptation itself. In the adaptation view, rape is a
facultative reproductive strategy, meaning that rape is the result of
natural selection favoring men who commit rape when its evolutionary
benefits in terms of producing offspring outweigh its evolutionary
costs (such as decreases in the number of offspring produced because
of injury or punishment).

There is a significant feminist response to this research (see
especially Travis 2003 edited volume). For example,
Elisabeth Lloyd (2003) reveals gaps and unjustified assumptions in
Thornhill and Palmer's evolutionary arguments. She points
out that Thornhill and Palmer's view is problematically
adaptationist, meaning that it exhibits an unjustified commitment to
natural selection over other kinds of explanation (see Gould and
Lewontin 1979 for the main explanation of, and argument against,
adaptationism (see the entry on adaptationism), Further,
Lloyd shows that they fail to demonstrate that the behavior in question
is heritable or that it is the product of natural selection.
Finally, Lloyd points out that Thornhill and Palmer make the
unjustified assumption that rape is a unitary phenomenon in the face of
the “striking disunity among the various acts that are classed as
rape” (240).

Emily Martin (2003) also points out that Thornhill and Palmer make
problematic assumptions in their definition of ‘rape’. She
argues that they falsely assume that rape is a static trait not only
across cultures, but across species, that they fail to see that
characterizing a behavior as rape requires a culturally specific notion
of consent and that cultural meanings of rape have changed over
time. (See the entry on
feminist perspectives on rape for
a more detailed discussion of issues of consent. There remains an
opportunity for feminist philosophy of biology concerning rape to be
further integrated with feminist literature concerning rape.) Martin
points out a second category of assumptions in Thornhill and
Palmer's work regarding individualism, competition, and
aggression, arising out of evolutionary theory itself. She points
out the influence of Malthus' work on overpopulation and scarcity
of resources and of Adam Smith's economics on Darwin's
formulation of natural selection. She argues that evolutionary
explanations tend to be based on notions of individual competition
under conditions of scarcity, which are historically and culturally
specific and need not hold. She writes, “As Thornhill and
Palmer, as well as most who espouse the tenets of sociobiology, see the
world, it is make up of highly individualized agents bent on maximizing
their own advantage, defined as increasing their genetic stake in the
next generation. Any means to that end, however ruthless, violent
or aggressive, will be looked for and justified as necessary to
increasing fitness, so defined” (375).

A second category of feminist concern regarding much research in
sociobiology and evolutionary psychology involves problematic
assumptions of a coarse causal connection between genes and
behavior. These assumptions, coupled with the assertion that
human behaviors are the result of natural selection, makes it seem as
though, as Ruth Bleier (1984, 15) puts it, “we had best resign
ourselves to the more unsavory aspects of human behavior.”
The worry is that these studies of the evolution of human behavior
cast behaviors such as violence against women, wives, and children,
and the sexual division of labor as biologically determined, hence
making attempts at social change seem futile.

For example, sociobiologist, David Barash writes, “There is
good reason to believe that we are (genetically) primed to be much less
sexually egalitarian than we appear to be” (1979, 47) and
“Because men maximize their fitness differently from women, it is
perfectly good biology that business and professions taste sweeter to
them, while home and child care taste sweeter to women” (1979,
114). When it comes to sex, sociobiologist E.O. Wilson writes,
“It pays for males to be aggressive, hasty, fickle and
undiscriminating. In theory it is more profitable for females to
be coy, to hold back until they can identify males with the best
genes… Human beings obey this biological principle
faithfully” (1978, 125).

Evolutionary psychologists tend to argue that the mechanisms that
produce behaviors (modules), rather than the behaviors themselves, are
adaptations. This allows them to introduce flexibility in the
expression of behaviors, because some of these mechanisms may be
triggered by specific environmental conditions that might not be
present. In the example of the evolution of rape discussed above,
the argument is not that all men rape, but rather that rape is adaptive
in environments where its evolutionary benefits outweigh the
costs. However, note that the claim is still that rape is a
universal, cross-cultural adaptation, a mechanism ready and waiting to
be triggered by the right environmental conditions.

Feminist and non-feminist philosophers of biology have identified a
range of problems common among much research in sociobiology and
evolutionary psychology. (The list below is primarily drawn from
Bleier 1984; see also Anne Fausto-Sterling 1997a, b, 2000; Kitcher 1985
and Sterelny and Griffiths 1999 offer a good overview and introduction
to the non-feminist literature.) These problems include kinds of bias
as well as methodological challenges.

Androcentrism. Historically female primates were
studied only in their interactions with males or with infants.
Women primatologists (see Haraway 1989) and sociobiologists (Hrdy 1986)
who carefully observed females, as well as other members of primate
groups, discovered new information that overthrew previously held
beliefs regarding dominance hierarchies, mate selection, and
female-female competition by focusing on female-female
interactions.

Ethnocentrism. Much research on human behavior focuses on
identifying and explaining behavioral traits that are universal among
humans and have a cross-cultural meaning. For example, Buss
argues that love is cross-cultural (1994/2003) and Wilson and Daly that
marriage is cross-cultural (1992). However, human beings live in a wide
variety of cultural and environmental contexts. John Dupré
writes

Anthropologists describe systems of marriage that are monogamous,
polygamous, occasionally polyandrous, hypergamous or hypogamous (women
marrying up or down although equal status is said to be the commonest
case), between people of the same sex, and is some cases as not
involving sexual relations at all (2001, 59).

This makes it difficult to imagine what the cross-cultural universal
could be. It also makes it very easy to make false assumptions
about the nature of such a phenomenon based on a particular cultural
perspective.

Anthropocentrism. There is room for unrecognized or
implicit social values to enter into research when researchers make
comparisons among species. It is easy to create circular
arguments when researchers use loaded terms, defined in the context of
particular human language and culture, to describe animal behavior and
then use those descriptions to argue that human behaviors are innate
because they are found in animals. For example, it is common to
refer to ‘harems’ and ‘prostitution’ when
describing the behavior of non-human primates. There is an
extensive literature on the evolution of rape, with rape being
‘observed’ in flowers, scorpion flies, some species of fish
and ducks, and then these observations are used to draw conclusions
about the biological nature of rape in humans. An obvious problem
is that rape in humans is defined as sex in the absence of consent or
that is against the victim's will. The same notion of
consent or will in flowers, flies, fish, and ducks is absent.

Lack of attention to limitations inherent in studying
humans. Human behavior is a fraught area of study. On one
hand it is seductive because there is a deep interest in trying to
understand why we behave as we do. One the other hand, if
researchers are trying to understand social behavior in general, there
is little to recommend human beings as experimental subjects.
First, it is unethical to perform the necessary controlled experiments
on humans. Furthermore, such experiments are impractical because we
live too long for researchers to conveniently follow the development
and evolutionary consequences of particular behavioral traits and
tendencies. In addition, a common evolutionary investigative
technique is to compare traits among closely related species. However
as Sterelny and Griffiths (1999) point out, human beings are
evolutionary orphans. Even though there are several species of
non-human primates that are extensively studied, they are simply not as
numerous, nor do they form as closely a related group of species with
humans, as can be found in, for example, groups of social ant or bee
species. Finally, human behavior is complicated by intentionality,
language and culture, which make comparisons between human and
non-human animals challenging. For example, refer back
Martin's (2003) critique of evolutionary explanations of
rape. The notion of consent means something very different in a
human as opposed to an animal context. As a result of limitations
inherent to studying the evolution of human behavior, it is more
challenging to draw conclusions about human behavior than about the
behavior of many other groups of animals, and conclusions about human
beings might need to be more tentative than conclusions about other
organisms.

Lack of attention to changing environments. There is a lack
of good information about the environment, including the social
environment, in which humans evolved. We know that there are
differences among the environments in which people currently live and
between current environments and early human environments. Postulating
evolutionary adaptations only makes sense in reference to a particular
environment because adaptations are responses to particular
environmental challenges. A behavior may be an adaptation to a past
environment and not benefit individuals in a current environment.
Alternatively, a behavior may benefit an individual without being the
result of natural selection for that benefit. As a result, conclusions
drawn about the evolution of human behavior need to be
tentative.

Adaptationism (Failure to adequately consider causes of
evolution other than natural selection). Causes of evolution other
than natural selection must be tested. For example, even if there
are behaviors that are correlated with specific genes it does not
follow that the behavior is the result of natural selection and hence
is an adaptation. Genes commonly have multiple effects and it is
possible for natural selection to select for only one of those
effects. In this case the other effect will increase in frequency
in the population even though it is not selected for. A similar
case can occur when two genes are linked on the same chromosome.
In this way a behavior may be very common not because it confers an
evolutionary advantage, but because it is associated with a different
beneficial trait. Other causes of evolution include random drift,
mutation, and immigration of individuals between
populations. Recall that Elisabeth Lloyd (2003) identified
adaptationism as a problem with Thornhill and Palmer's arguments
about the evolution of rape.

Lack of clear definitions of behavior. Behavioral traits
need to be clearly defined. For example, it is postulated that
males are naturally more aggressive than females. What counts as
aggression is unclear. Is it going to war, or punching another
individual, or having very active adrenal function? The
appropriate grain of analysis is not clear. If one lives in a
culture in which males are considered more aggressive than females,
then one may notice the higher proportion of men rather than women who
commit violent crimes and not notice cases of females fighting to
defend their offspring or competing with each other for
resources. The issue of defining traits is not only a matter of
clarity. Ontology is at stake because for evolutionary hypotheses
to explain what exists in the world, our definitions must divide up the
world into traits that are passed from generation to generation and on
which natural selection can act.

Problematic choice of comparison species. The data
one can gather and the conclusions one can draw about human behavioral
evolution from non-human primates are highly dependent on the primate
species to which one attends. For example, in mid-20th century
primatology researchers chose species for study, such as savanna
baboons, which had social structures that seemed similar to
humans. In the 1970's feminist primatologists were
instrumental in convincing the scientific community that chimpanzees
were a more appropriate species for modeling key transitions in human
evolution. This switch in model organism was supported by
molecular phylogenetic, comparative anatomical, and paleontological
data, but it was also a strategic feminist move, as chimpanzees are
matrifocal creatures with complex social lives. This facilitated
a research focus on mothering, which was consistent with the focus on
maternal thinking and social motherhood in that period of western
feminism (Haraway 1989). There are at least two kinds of
recommendations that arise here. First, if one is focusing on
removing bias, then one should take care not to falsely generalize
across the diversity that can be found among primate species (Hrdy
1986). Second, one needs to take responsibility for one's
choice of model organism, because it will have an impact on the kinds
of knowledge that one can produce (Haraway 1989).

Evolutionary research regarding human behavior is especially
difficult to do well. It is very easy to take an aspect of human
social behavior that seems universal to a particular group of
researchers, for example male aggression, and create a compelling but
unsupported story about why that behavior enhances the survival and
reproduction of individuals exhibiting it and hence
‘explains’ why it is currently
‘universal.’ In particular, there is little analysis
of just what it is that makes these stories seem compelling or even
commonsensical. It is important to note that these just-so
stories predominantly support the social status quo and traditional
Western, capitalist, patriarchal ‘virtues’ ranging from a
tendency to be entrepreneurial and the inevitability of hierarchical
social arrangements, to the naturalness of male promiscuity and
violence against women. Although some feminists are very pessimistic
about the possibility of conducting non-sexist research on the
evolution of human behavior, there is not a general view within
feminist philosophy of biology that all sociobiological research is
problematic. In fact, some feminist critics and scientists use
non-sexist sociobiological research on non-human animals (for example
the work of Sarah Hrdy) to critique problematic evolutionary accounts of gendered
behavior.

Sexual selection and evolutionary accounts of behavior that relate
to sex and gender are examples of two areas of science that have been
treated to extensive analysis by feminist philosophers of
biology. This entry now turns to common themes in feminist
philosophy of biology.

As previously stated, biological or genetic determinism is the view
that individual, low-level and often genetic factors are the primary
causes of biological phenomena. Feminists are concerned with
determinism because it has been used to argue that political change is
futile because sex and gender at the individual and social level are
caused by a static, biological human nature. Feminists have
criticized biological or genetic determinism in a number of biological
disciplines. Within genetics and molecular biology researchers
such as Evelyn Fox Keller (2000), Bonnie Spanier (1995) Ruth Hubbard
(1990) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (1992) have pointed out the logical and
empirical distance between an organism having a particular genotype and
expressing a particular phenotype, including behaviors. Non-feminist
philosophers of biology have also developed criticisms of biological
determinism (an influential example is Richard Lewontin's book
Biology as Ideology 1992).

For example, the causal relationship between genes and the
particular proteins that result in phenotypes is called the Central
Dogma. According to the Central Dogma, information flows from DNA to
RNA to protein, and not in the other direction. DNA
specifies messenger RNA in a process called transcription.
Messenger RNA plays a role in specifying the amino acid sequence of a
protein which is the fundamental structure of an organism's
phenotype. Feminist and non-feminist philosophers of biology,
along with many biologists, have pointed out that this causal chain is
extremely complicated and that a particular genotype can result in
different phenotypes in different contexts. There are gene regulation
mechanisms that turn genes on and off, and control the rate of
transcription. There are hereditary mechanisms whereby once a
portion of DNA is rendered inactive in a cell it remains inactive in
all of that cell's descendents. The cellular environment
affects what DNA is transcribed and the fate of particular DNA
transcripts. A sequence of DNA does not uniquely specify a
particular protein. The machinery of the cell processes the RNA
transcript. During this processing different portions of an RNA
strand can be spliced out resulting in a different end products, which
means that same DNA sequence can result in different proteins and
different phenotypic traits. The nature of the relationship
between a sequence of DNA and the traits of an organism is
complicated. Although genes make a difference in an
organism's phenotype, they are not the sole causes determining
that phenotype. Simple pictures of genetic determinism are not
supported by molecular biology.

Feminist and non-feminist philosophers of biology have made it clear
that even if a trait is the result of evolution by natural selection,
or in other words is an adaptation, it does not follow that the trait
is uniformly expressed in a population or static in an individual over
time. Some adaptive traits are almost always present and others
require very specific environmental conditions in order to
develop. One could have the genetic correlate of a trait and that
trait could be the result of natural selection, and yet changing the
environment could eliminate the expression of that trait. Some traits
are adaptations to past environmental conditions and are not beneficial
to organisms in current conditions. Some traits are present and
very beneficial, and yet are not the result of natural selection and
hence are not adaptations. Simple pictures of biological determinism
are thus not supported by evolutionary biology (for example see Keller
2000).

Another aspect of biology that has been used to support determinist
arguments involves differences in male and female brains, and the
effects of sex hormones on the expression of behavioral traits.
Feminist responses in these areas primarily consist of careful analysis
of studies used to support these determinist arguments. For
example, Bleier (1984) points out the futility of separating nature
from nurture, or in other words the structural and hormonal aspects of
brain development, from social learning and environmental influences on
brain development. She points out that the fetal and postnatal
development of the brain is highly influenced by environmental inputs,
the human brain exhibits high levels of developmental plasticity, is
sensitive to experience, and finally that humans are very good at
learning. It is very difficult to determine whether or not
sexually dichotomized behaviors, which may be correlated with genetic,
hormonal or brain differences, are fixed or changeable.

Feminist philosophers of biology, such as Bleier (1984) and
Fausto-Sterling (1992), reveal a series of problems with studies that
purport to find sex differences in brain anatomy, brain lateralization,
and hormones that are correlated with gender differences in behavioral
traits and abilities. These critiques include pointing out that
(1) for most of the behavioral traits in question there is more overlap
than difference among populations of men and women, (2) these studies
are often based on limited data and insufficient sample sizes, (3)
these studies often involve unwarranted extrapolation from rodent
models to humans, (4) there are problems with the biological conversion
of androgens to estrogens in the body that make it difficult to
interpret in vivo experiments, and finally (5) there is also a
tendency to discount social causes of putative differences between the
sexes (see also Fehr 2004).

Feminist analyses of reductionism in biology concern the tendency to
employ methods that look for causes and explanations at low levels of
biological organization and within the system being studied. This
can lead researchers to ignore or undervalue the context in which a
phenomenon is found, and hence to value genetic and physiological over
social causes, and organismal over environmental factors. This
view enables arguments for biological determinism, because it supports
the idea that the most important causes for a phenomenon, including
human behavior and social organization, are within a person and at the
genetic level (Fehr 2004). Within a reductionist framework causes
based on environmental influences such as learning and social
structures are undervalued.

For example, feminists have scrutinized reductionism with regard to
the role of hormones in developmental biology in one of the most
ubiquitous model organisms, rats (Birke 1986, Longino and Doell 1983,
Longino 1990). In an early model of this system, which Longino
and Doell called the linear-hormonal model, prenatal and
perinatal hormone levels are assumed to be the basis for behavioral sex
differences. The assumption was that a gene on the Y chromosome
triggers the development of testes, and that the hormones released by
these brand new testes affect the structure of the rodent brain during
a critical developmental period. The presence of testes and the
hormones that they produce were assumed to cause the male brain to
develop such that the male performs ‘stereotypical’ male
sexual behavior; in the absence of testes and the hormones that they
produce the female brain to develops in such a way as to cause the
female to perform ‘stereotypical’ female behavior.
Longino points out that in this explanatory model it is assumed that
there is a “unidirectional and irreversible sequence of
(biochemical) events” (Longino 1990, 135).

Birke writes of this early model:

Even if it is not always made explicit, the framework
within which this line of reasoning has progressed is that hormones in
early life are the prime determinants of adult patterns of sexual
behavior. To a large extent this assumption still holds, and the
existence of sex differences in behaviour in adults is frequently
attributed to perinatal hormone effects. Now it may well be true
that hormones exert a large effect. The problem is not there, but
with the exclusive focus on hormones from the individual's own
testes or lack of them which dominated research for several decades
(Birke 1986, 96).

This is a powerful model because it fits within a reductive
framework (Fehr 2004). Genes cause anatomical differences, which cause
hormonal differences, which cause brain differences, which cause
behavioral differences. Birke argues that the relationship
between hormones and behavior is much more complicated than this tidy
reductionist picture implies. She advocates an interactionist
model instead of the linear-hormonal model. She points out
that research is beginning to embrace a much more complex picture of
the causes of sexual behavior, a picture that involves interactions
among the mother, the fetus, the physiological and social environment
as well as the genes, the internal anatomy and the brain structure of
the developing fetus. In this model, before birth the pups are
influenced by factors such as the sex of other members of the litter,
the mother's environment, and the mother's hormonal
states. Birke writes, “Even before birth… it is
difficult to separate the individual pup and its hormones from a
network of complex processes” (Birke 1986, 97). After birth,
factors such as the pup's own hormones, maternal care (which is
differential depending on the sex of the pup), the physical environment
and the other pups influence adult sexual behavior. When the pup
becomes an adult, factors in its physical and social environment as
well as its hormonal states and its own behavior influence its sexual
behavior. The interactionist model does not ignore low level causes,
such as genes or hormones, it simply refuses to privilege them over
what may be thought of as higher level environmental and social causes
of behavior.

In this case, feminist analysis shows that uncritically embracing a
reductive model overlooks other higher-level and environmental causes
of behavior, and was involved in generating an alternative model that
was empirically testable. It is an example of both the critical
and the constructive sides of feminist philosophy of biology.
Critiques of reductionism are also common in non-feminist philosophy of
biology starting with the work of David Hull (1972,1974) (see the entry
on reductionism in biology for a thorough review).

There is significant feminist work on the role of gender-laden
language, and in particular of metaphor, in biology. Evelyn Fox
Keller has done significant work on “Master Molecule”
characterizations of DNA (1983, 1985). She has also argued that
cultural norms enter into evolutionary biology, particularly
mathematical ecology, due to a slippage between technical and
colloquial uses of the word “competition,” and that the
language of reproductive autonomy supports a bias towards individualism
in biology (Keller 1992b). Emily Martin (1991) and the
Biology and Gender Study Group (1988) both have shown that romantic
metaphors play a confounding role in biological descriptions of
fertilization. In some cases, supporting false assumptions of
female passivity, the egg is cast in the role of Sleeping Beauty that
is awakened by the valiant sperm, which struggled to beat out its
rivals and awaken the egg. In stories that acknowledge the
activity of the egg, it is cast in the role of femme fatale, snagging
the hapless sperm and dragging it into its clutches. Both sets of
stories cohere with female stereotypes and neither of them clearly
describes the reciprocal interactions between the egg and the sperm
during reproduction.

There is strong support for several aspects of pluralism in feminist
philosophy of biology. This pluralism arises out of attention to
the complexity and heterogeneity of biological phenomena and the
different social and epistemic contexts in which research is
conducted. It tends to focus on the multitude of ways that
objects and categories can be constructed and the differences among the
partial perspectives of biologists who are differently situated (for
example those taking a feminist as opposed to a non-feminist
perspective on their research) (Haraway 1988). This can result in
a willingness to see multiple explanations for the same phenomena as a
virtue that arises from attending to these ontological and/or epistemic
possibilities (Longino 2002, Fehr 2004). For example, feminists
have critiqued “man-the-hunter” theories of human evolution
because they focus on a single cause, hunting, of a complex and varied
evolutionary history (Bleier 1984). They point out that while
hunting played a role, gathering was likely the primary source of
nutrition, and that the reciprocal interaction of many factors, such as
the development of language and culture, likely played important roles
in the evolution of human beings.

Feminists have also been critical of tendencies to view nature in
terms of sexualized dichotomies. This is evidenced in Anne
Fausto-Sterling's research on sexuality and intersexed
individuals (2000). She shows that biology and medicine,
literally, surgically construct intersexed individuals to fit more
closely into either one gender or the other. Feminist
philosophers of biology have been particularly vigilant in pointing out
the problems with the association of sexual dichotomies with male
activity and female passivity. This is supported by analyses,
discussed above, of how the narrative of the sleeping egg being
awakened by the sperm distorted our understanding of
fertilization. There has also been work along these
lines in analyses of developmental biology in which it is assumed that
embryos develop along a female path by default unless a gene of the Y
chromosome switches on the male pattern of development (Gilbert and
Rader 2001, Richardson 2008). Finally, there is significant
non-feminist work on pluralism in the philosophy of biology (for
example Dupré 1993, Kellert et al 2006, Fehr 2006).

There are at least three areas in which feminist philosophy of
biology can be fruitfully developed. First, it is striking that
there are many topics that feminist and non-feminist philosophers of
biology both address, but there is often a paucity of interactions
between these two bodies of literature. For example, reductionism
is a central area of investigation in both fields, and in both fields
there is generally an anti-reductionist consensus, yet feminist and
non-feminist philosophers of biology rarely cite each others'
work (for an exception see Dupré 2001). There is a wide range of
anti-reductionist arguments on which feminists could draw and
non-feminists can be aided by careful considerations of the social and
political impact of reductionism. More interaction between these
groups of scholars could be mutually beneficial.

Second, there is room for further integrating feminist philosophy of
biology with feminist epistemology and philosophy of science.
Feminist philosophy of biology includes a vast body of literature
documenting the impact of sexism and androcentrism in both the practice
of biology and the knowledge produced by biologists. There are
significant opportunities to further develop this work in light of
advances in feminist and social epistemology. For example, it
would be interesting to consider many of the feminist criticisms of
gender bias in biology from the perspective of social accounts of
knowledge production or using Haraway's notion of situated
knowledges.

Finally, there are opportunities to develop feminist analyses on a
wide range of topics in the biological sciences. These include
more contemporary scientific research on topics covered by classic
works in feminist philosophy of biology. For example Anne
Fausto-Sterling (1992) and Ruth Bleier (1984) critiqued research on
sexual selection, and related work in sociobiology and evolutionary
psychology, for focusing on individual sperm as a unit for determining
the male contribution to reproduction. Since then biological research
on sexual selection and Darwinian feminist approaches to sociobiology
and evolutionary ecology (although little in evolutionary psychology)
have addressed this issue. There are opportunities for feminist
philosophers of biology to engage this shift in scientific research
focus. Opportunities also exist for feminist philosophy of
biology to analyze other topics and groups of researchers in the
biological sciences, including Darwinian feminist research on life
history strategies and the evolution of male and female reproductive
strategies. Finally there are opportunities to develop feminist
analyses of topics that are relatively new such as research on genomics
as it relates to gender (see the work Evelyn Fox Keller 2000).
In all of these areas of investigation there is room to ask questions
about the efficacy of the relevant scientific practices at producing
maximally accurate representations of gender as well as epistemic
questions rooted in recent work in feminist epistemology.

–––, 1979. “Social and Political Bias in Science: An
Examination of Animal Studies and Their Generalizations to Human
Behavior and Evolution,” Genes and Gender II, Ruth
Hubbard and Marian Lowe (eds.), New York: Gordian Press, 49–70.

–––, 1984. Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and its
Theories on Women, Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay and Lewontin Richard, 1979. “The Spandrels of San
Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist
Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B,
Biological Sciences, 205(1161): 581–598.

Haraway, Donna, 1978. “Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy
of the Body Politic, Part 1: A Political Physiology of
Dominance,” Signs, 4: 21–36.

–––, 1978. “Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body
Politic, Part II: The Past is the Contested Zone: Human Nature and
Theories of Production and Reproduction in Primate Behavior
Studies,” Signs, 4:37–60.

Smuts, Barbara, and Robert Smuts, 1993. “Male Aggression and
Sexual Coercion of Females in Nonhuman Primates and Other Mammals:
Evidence and Theoretical Implications,” Advances in the Study
of Behavior, 33: 1349–1352.

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from 1997 to 2007.
Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to neh50@neh.gov.